Children of the Night
by element78
Summary: Not every creature in the forest is impressed by werewolves. Scott learns this the hard way.


A/N: This is, hands down, the stupidest thing I've ever written. On the plus side, it's also one of the shortest things I've ever written, which anyone who reads my Supernatural fics knows is something I have serious difficulty with.

Post season-two timeframe, so no Allison gooeyness because it bothers me. Also, warning for utter ridiculousness that doesn't even qualify as crack because it isn't funny enough. Just an issue that needed addressing, methinks.

* * *

It's not the full moon, and his wolf form wants nothing to do with any of this, so it's a long walk back to town. The walk of shame, he thinks, head down and hands shoved into his pockets. He's panting- hyperventilating, really- in short little breaths through his mouth. It will be _days_ before he can smell anything again.

"This sucks," he mutters.

"I know," Isaac calls over, and to his credit, he doesn't sound like he's trying not to laugh, which makes him the only one who hasn't so far. In a show of solidarity, after they'd found a sulking Scott in the forest, Derek had sent his baby wolves to walk the packless retard home. Or, at least, had tried to send them. Erica had been laughing so hard she'd started turning blue and had to be sat down on the forest floor and coached through proper breathing, and Boyd flat out didn't want to. So Isaac had gone with him. He's about half a mile upwind, but he's gamely sticking it out, which is honestly more than Scott had expected.

"Why couldn't this have happened to someone else?" Scott doesn't-whine. After a belated moment he realizes what he just said, and to who, and hurriedly adds, "Like Peter. Or Boyd. They deserve it."

"Or Erica," Isaac adds, sounding as though he's lost in the pleasant images this thought evokes, and Scott makes a mental note to tell Stiles the other young wolves have the same general opinion of their female packmate as Stiles himself does.

"D'you have service yet?" Scott asks, looking into the shadows to his right. He watches as the vaguely Isaac-shaped blur in the distance searches it pockets- he'd see better wolfed-out, of course, but Derek had solemnly advised against trying to change, right before the big jerk sneezed in Scott's face and had to move away so he would have fresh air to breathe as he laughed. After a moment Isaac's face is lit by an unearthly pale blue glow, his eyes yellow pinpricks of reflected light.

"Yeah, finally," he replies. "Want me to call your mom? Or Stiles?"

"Mom's at work," Scott says morosely, which sucks, because unlike Stiles she would actually, eventually, let him live this down. "Just… tell him to get a lot of tomato sauce."

The phone is ringing- Scott can hear it distantly through the speaker- when Isaac says, "Wait. Is it tomato sauce or juice?"

Scott groans and buries his head in his hands and hates himself some more.

* * *

The warning was taken to heart, apparently, for Stiles greets them at the back door of his house wearing rubber gloves and a giant apron and what looks suspiciously like-

"A gas mask?" Scott asks in disbelief.

Isaac, forced by the urban sprawl to close distance with Scott, sneezes and wrinkles his nose. "Can I borrow that?" he asks, voice thick.

"Are you my mommy?" Stiles replies, and when the two werewolves give him blank looks, he sighs. "Oh, come on, it's only the most iconic gas mask reference since 2005."

"Seriously, can I borrow that?" Isaac repeats, hands out in gimme fashion. Stiles sighs again, the sound filtered by the mask, then strips it off and tosses it to the wolf.

Scott looks at Stiles with his long-perfected kicked-puppy face, trying the sympathy route. It hasn't gotten him very far yet tonight, but this is Stiles, his oldest friend and long-time mark. Stiles really is the brains of the operation- which, honestly, is just a bit terrifying, kind of like boarding a school bus to see the driver is a Ritalin-addicted chimpanzee- so Scott's had to come up with alternative methods to get what he wants when logic fails him. Long before he had the whole _because I'm a werewolf, now do what I say_, he had his sad, sad eyes.

"That stopped working years ago," Stiles tells him. He puts his hands on his hips and frowns down at his miserable friend. He looks very much like his father in that moment, if Sheriff Stilinski would ever deign to wear a flower-print apron, which if he does is cool but Scott _does not _want to know. "You are a source of shame to all werewolfdom. You know that, right?"

Isaac snorts behind the gas mask. Then he coughs and pulls the mask off his face. "This smells like mothballs," he says in a just-so-you-know sort of tone, breathing in the relatively fresh night air. Then he sneezes, gives Scott a vaguely accusing look, and pulls the mask back down.

"It was in the attic," Stiles tells him. "And how is it my best friend is the only werewolf in the world who gets _skunked_? It's embarrassing to be associated with you, sometimes."

Scott is rapidly losing control of the situation- inasmuch as he ever had any- and feels the need to regain some measure of dignity. "It was walking funny," he says, jerking his chin up in a challenge. "I thought it might be hurt. I was trying to help it."

"Skunks always walk funny, Scott," Stiles tells him. "They waddle, because they're fat, because _nothing in the world _messes with them. And do you realize it's Friday night? What if I had better things to do than go buy out all the tomato juice in the store? I have a social life now, you know."

Pointing out that his social circle is seventy-five percent werewolves who only hang out with him because of Scott does not seem the wisest way to handle this. Scott mutters something under his breath and scuffs at the grass with his sneaker and ramps up the adorableness to eleven.

"Why are you here, anyway?" Steamroller Stiles turns on Isaac, who blinks at him with big eyes behind the mask. "Did he need a babysitter or something or- oh God, please don't tell me it got you too."

"No," Isaac says, voice crackly and muffled by the mask. "We heard Scott-" Here he pauses, obviously trying to decide between truth and diplomacy, and settles on the latter- "out in the forest, and it sounded like he was in trouble, so we went to go see if he needed help."

"You were screaming like a little girl, weren't you," Stiles says flatly to Scott, not a question so much as a resigned statement, thus proving that he knows Scott far too well.

"No," Scott protests. Isaac snorts, then inhales the mothball scent and chokes, and Scott feels a little better.

"Seriously, how can you even call yourself a werewolf?" Stiles demands.

"That's what Derek said," Isaac chips in.

"Yeah, thanks, Isaac, you can go back to the pack now, I got it from here," Scott says loudly, because Isaac has gone from quietly supportive to openly mocking, and Stiles really doesn't need any help there.

Isaac pulls the mask off, revealing his grin, and passes it over to Stiles. He waves as he trots off. Scott just knows this is going on Derek's List Of Reasons Why It's A Good Thing Scott Refuses To Join The Pack, under the subheading Item One: Because He's An Idiot.

"Take your clothes off," Stiles orders, pulling on his down-to-business face, as he hefts a giant can of tomato juice.

"Shouldn't we go inside?" Scott asks, glancing nervously around.

"You're kidding, right?" Stiles counters. He jerks his thumb over to indicate the house to the left. "And really, why bother? Mrs. Johansson already thinks I'm a drug dealer or something. She actually called my dad up last week to complain about my life choices, did you know that? Granted, she's probably seen Derek crawling in my bedroom window a couple times, and the whole Leather Kids gang really doesn't help the whole drug dealer thing-"

"Why would Derek go in your bedroom?" Scott asks as he peels his shirt off. He'd debated doing so in the forest, since it had taken the worst of the skunk blast, but there had been no noticeable difference in the scent with his shirt off. He drops it on the porch, where it adheres with a wet-sounding _splat_ to the concrete.

"Because he mistakenly believes I can protect him from hunters and my own father, and apparently behind my bedroom door is the only hiding place he knows in the whole freakin' world." Stiles kicks one of those plastic kiddie wading pools towards Scott. "Sit, boy."

"Where'd you get this?" Scott asks, and when Stiles fails to immediately answer, looks up at him.

"I'll wash it out before I give it back," Stiles says, all wounded dignity. "Now sit."

Scott, clad only in his boxers, sits. He wraps his arms around himself in abject misery. Behind him Stiles is busy opening the cans. He won't even have to lie about why he needed to use the in-case-of-emergency-only money to buy tomato juice, Scott thinks sourly. Thank God the Sheriff is busy tonight, because having him here to see this would just be the icing on the humiliation cake.

"I'm going to smell like tomato soup for days," he says mournfully.

"Better than skunked dog for weeks," Stiles says philosophically.

Then he takes a can of juice and dumps it all straight on top of Scott's head, and that effectively ends the conversation.

* * *

By the time Scott makes it home, his mother is already there, which is really only just adding insult to injury because she gags and laughs and sprays him down with the hose for five minutes before letting him come into the house. It takes three showers to wash away the tomato smell and three days of showers to wash away the lingering traces of skunk. The shirt is a total loss and goes, double-bagged, into the garbage. It's a week before his nose stops burning and another week before he can smell properly again.

The next time he sees the ominous white stripe in the dark, waddling along like the king of the forest, he does a sharp one-eighty and thinks, as he runs, that it kind of does make sense that Derek wouldn't have warned him about this unusual danger before. No one wants to admit a skunk can completely own a werewolf.


End file.
